Ever since its inception, there have been problems with Compiz; people unsatisfied with the direction of the project forked it, then they merged again. Recently, the project, now known as Compiz Fusion, faced other problems, such as multiple branches and a lack of direction. A major reorganisation of the project is supposed to fix all this.

Wish I could say the same - I have a GeForce 6600GT and the 180.22 driver didn't fix anything for me.

I'm definitely still a fan of KDE 4.2 and Kwin but my desktop effects have been jerky right from the start(mainly the fade-in/out of windows, incl the fade-in to the desktop on startup).

I've been using 180.22 since it was in the nvidia repo and it didn't change anything for me. I'm led to believe there is no point making changes in the xorg.conf since most of the successful options are now on by default in the new driver.

The ONE thing that gave me success is turning OFF direct rendering within the kde control panel - desktop options. Made things much smoother...

This makes no sense whatsoever. Apparently direct rendering should lower cpu usage but I found it made almost no difference. The only problem was kaffeine didn't perform quite so well when watching tv (dvb). but this was only slightly noticeable.

I'm still happy using kde 4 though - dont get me wrong. I just put up with the sub-par graphics performance. Linux seems to be going backwards in this area for me. Hopefully they can fix it soon, either through xorg or kde or both.